1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus for dividing an image into a plurality of areas, and combining two or more areas which satisfy a combining condition, and a control method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-247237 describes a document image processing apparatus which scans an image of an original, divides the scanned image into a plurality of elements, and manages data for respective elements. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-247237 discloses a technique for extracting an article across pages from a document including a plurality of pages. Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-15826 describes a document analysis apparatus, which receives a document divided into blocks, and combines the blocks to reconstruct them to one block.
However, these related arts suffer a problem that elements other than text cannot be combined. That is, since blocks of graphics, photos, and the like cannot be combined, these graphics and photos are managed as other image contents. For this reason, upon re-editing and printing image data, a plurality of contents need to be edited. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-247237 discloses that text areas are combined until a title or separator is detected in the text area. For this reason, it is difficult to combine text areas designated with layouts such as a multicolumn layout and the like. After text areas are re-edited and their sizes are increased or decreased, when a document including these text areas is printed, layouts originally set in that document are collapsed, thus posing another problem.